Elon Musk on Tuesday said he would reinstate former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
The Tesla CEO who’s vying to buy Twitter and take it private for a reported price tag of $44 billion made the comment at the Financial Times Future of the Car conference.
“I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” Musk said. “I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.”
Musk added that Trump’s ban was “morally wrong and flat-out stupid.”
Trump’s account was permanently banned after the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, with Twitter saying his continued presence on the platform was a “risk of further incitement of violence.”
Musk added that permanent bans should be “extremely rare” and reserved for “bots, or spam/scam accounts.”
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said in a recent statement.
Trump has said he does not intend to rejoin Twitter and will focus mostly on the social network he launched called Truth Social.
Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press and Reuters.